According to voting records, the woman is a registered Democrat, although it’s unknown if she voted for Obama.

Reacting to the news of the woman’s party affiliation, Johnson says in comments:

This picture has been around since 2008, and it shows up exclusively on right wing mailing lists and websites. It’s ridiculous to try to deny that this is an example of right wing racism — the message of a black man shining Sarah Palin’s shoes could not possibly be more obvious.

And it doesn’t matter if the woman in this case is registered Democrat or not. This is not something a supporter of Barack Obama would send to anyone.

Ah, but one need not be a right-winger to oppose Obama. Maybe the woman was a Hillary supporter. Maybe she is an ardent Democrat who feels that Obama has been insufficiently pugnacious in responding to Palin’s attacks on his health care plan. Or maybe she’s just an old racist who likes forwarding pictures of black guys shining other people’s shoes.

Whatever her motivation, Johnson ought to update his post to note that the “right-wing racism” he denounces was a picture forwarded by a Democrat. That’s not asking too much, is it?

But unfortunately, it’s a simple fact that this picture did originate from the right wing, regardless of this particular woman’s party affiliation — as I show in the links posted immediately above. I have yet to discover it at a single left wing site, except as part of a post denouncing the racism of the right wing. So the idea that this is somehow a “left wing” image is completely silly.

However, the links he provides demonstrate no such thing. We don’t know where the picture originated from. and Charles’s links don’t begin to answer that question.

Now: the use of the picture by any particular person may or may not be racist, depending on the context. This fellow here uses the picture as part of an array of anti-Obama imagery, including a picture of a black-faced Obama with a gleaming white smile, holding a plate of fried chicken and watermelon, accompanied by a caption reading: “Lawdy! I sho’ loves campainnin’!” Dare I say it? That guy is a racist.

As for the Democrat who forwarded the picture in Colorado . . . I’m not sure what her motivation was. But her status as a registered Democrat cannot be ignored. Charles is right to update his post, and he should have done so before I pressured him to.

Does this mean that no right-wingers have used this image in a racist way? Of course not, as the above link shows. But Charles: until you’re ready to actually prove where the image originated, please don’t claim that you have done so. It’s this kind of overstatement that runs you into trouble.

UPDATE x2: Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link. He calls this Photoshop “racist.” I wonder if readers here agree with him. Feel free to discuss that issue in the comments.

UPDATE x3: I have been banned at Little Green Footballs for writing this post. Details here.

UPDATE x4: This has obviously happened to a lot of other people. I’m asking people to tell their own stories about being banned at LGF here.

UPDATE: Or is it racist? Rush Limbaugh actually was a shoeshine boy. Yeah the racial stereotype is a bit shaky — when I was a kid I knew older brothers of friends who did that; even in Birmingham, Alabama they were white. By the time I was a teenager, of course, shoeshines were on the way out.

Well, as I said above, context is key; the fellow who included it on his web site alongside a “Lawdy! I sho’ loves campainnin’!” Photoshop is clearly a racist, and almost certainly reveled in the racial stereotype on display in the Photoshop.

STILL MORE: Okay, reader Michael Demmons thinks I’m excusing racism here. Well, my first reaction here was that the pic was racist; I was trying to be fair by noting Maguire’s response. I still think the pic was racist, but now that every criticism of Obama is called racist, I suppose I’ve gotten jaded …

UPDATE x7: I tend to agree with Prof. Reynolds that the Photoshop is racist. Whether the picture was originally Photoshopped by a Republican or a Democrat, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where the creation of that image was not rooted in racist stereotypes to some extent.

Nor am I persuaded by the argument that This White Guy or That White Guy was a shoeshine boy. Go back to the link above that I labeled racist, and find the Photoshop of Obama holding fried chicken and watermelon. Lots of white people like those foods, too — but that doesn’t make the image any less obviously racist.

“The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.

More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.”

My family has received medical care from two Mayo Clinic locations, although not in Glendale. It does offer excellent care and one of the reasons is it watches its bottom line:

“The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.

Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said.”

The Mayo spokesman indicated it will assess the Glendale experiment “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona.” More doctors and hospitals may follow Mayo’s lead. The article notes that “doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007, a payment gap that has remained stable during the last decade.” In other words, reform is coming and it won’t all be from the government.

“What a small world it is when it comes to domestic terror. CNN reported yesterday that NWA Flight 253 Undie-bomber Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab attended the 16-day “Ilmfest” in Houston sponsored by the Al Maghrib Institute in August 2008 and two other Al Maghrib seminars in London before that (HT: JihadWatch). Al Maghrib trots out Yasir Qadhi to claim he’s shocked, SHOCKED! to see a terrorist associated with their organization (except, oops!, so was convicted terrorist Daniel Maldonado; DiscoverTheNetworks has more on the Al Maghrib Institute “moderates”).

But we can report exclusively at the Jawa Report that Qadhi’s Houston-based Ilmquest was selling more than a dozen different CD sets by none other than Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki as recently as last month. Ilmquest continued to hawk Awlaki’s wares even after the Ft. Hood massacre, but scrubbed any mention of Awlaki from their site as soon as he was connected to the Ft. Hood incident. Ah, but thanks to Google cache, they couldn’t hide all the evidence. A screenshot of Ilmquest’s Awlaki offerings is below the fold.

Yes, these fine moderate Muslims just happen to be selling CD sets of an Al-Qaeda cleric, and a would-be terrorist attends their events on two different continents and just happens to end up meeting that same Al-Qaeda cleric in Yemen. Will these random occurrences never stop!!!!????“

Amazingly, it gets worse. Guess who was a “featured speaker at the U.S. Counter-Radicalization Strategy conference organized by the National Counterterrorism Center” (NCTC) in the summer of 2008?

Furthermore, if part of the problem is the NCTC, let’s consider President Obama’s choice of John Brennan to investigate this “systemic failure.” Brennan will be reviewing the same watch-list system he helped design and the National Counterterrorism Center where he served as interim director.

— DRJ

MORE — CBS says the US-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was a key player in the Abdulmutallab bomb plot:

“CBS News correspondent Bob Orr reports that intelligence sources say evidence shows Awlaki is now “a significant part of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” and he has recently become “more of an operations guy.”

In the months before the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253, sources say Awlaki and suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had communications. And Abdulmutallab told federal investigators that he met face to face with Awlaki in Yemen as part of his indoctrination.”

ACORN: An article in Section A on Sept. 19 about the individuals whose video sting prompted the ACORN scandal incorrectly said one of them had targeted the community activist group because its voter registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls. Although the organization registers people mostly from those groups, James E. O’Keefe did not specifically mention them. The article was first published in the Washington Post, which published a correction on Sept. 22. The Times had overlooked the correction.

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